The result? Look at the screenshot below, my subscriber number went from 236 to 18 as of May 28th.

Now, fortunately, my business doesn’t totally rely on the newsletter, but I enjoyed keeping people up to date. But if I were a band or a singer-songwriter, or any other business whose revenue directly depended on the newsletter, this would be totally devastating.

Don’t get me wrong, I think the new rules and regulations are totally what we needed and they do make things better for the individual.

However, when I saw that most of the other newsletters sent out messages to the tune of “if you don’t do anything, we’ll consider you gave us your consent to use your data” I felt I had taken the route that led to me having an enormous disadvantage over these other businesses.

And this sort of feels like, again, the big guys follow the old tech mantra: “do first and ask permission later”. I don’t subscribe to this point of view, and because of that, I’m always struggling just a little bit more.

It’s the same reason why Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are overrun with state-backed troll accounts from Russia. Engagement leads to growth, growth is all that matters, and if the trolls and fake news are engaging, better not to look for them. The oft-quoted Upton Sinclair quote fits perfectly: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

I find it interesting that the downloads are mainly coming from country that have no censorship issue and people are free to speak their minds. Strange.. but perhaps the download happens over proxy servers and those are located in the those countries… that’s the logical exlanation, or what do you think?

Yes, Daniel Ek is a smart guy, getting very rich and I know there is a culture out there commending this.

I find it sad that it’s don on the back of the people who helped shaped almost everyones personalities in their formative years.

And yet, we’re talking about a day this year when new investors in Spotify will earn more than $100m, pretty much guaranteed, for doing nothing more than answering Daniel Ek’s call.
We’re also talking about a day where the major labels, who’ve taken somewhere between 15% and 20% in Spotify, get a ginormous one-hit windfall that looks almost impossible to attribute or audit to individual artists.

“From the earliest days of Apple I realized that we thrived when we created intellectual property. If people copied or stole our software we’d be out of business. If it weren’t protected there’d be no incentive for us to make new software or product designs. If protection of intellectual property begins to disappear creative companies will disappear or never get started. But there’s a simpler reason: it’s wrong to steal. It hurts other people, and it hurts your own character.”

For anyone doing business on the internet, the article below is essential reading.

This paragraph made me chuckle:

In September, after Bloomberg Businessweek asked Viant about its content, Myspace players began showing non-placeholder videos. But if the counters embedded in the players are accurate, those placeholders are some of the most watched clips in Internet history. Hitboy has amassed 690 million views. Even bigger is Surfing, which looks like someone butt-dialed a video: five seconds of black screen with some muffled background noise. According to the Myspace counter, Surfing has been viewed 1.5 billion times. That would make it bigger than any YouTube video in history—with the exception of Gangnam Style.

So, basically what the music industry has been saying for _years_ is, that music and music videos are one of the biggest drivers of traffic on the internet. Yet, the music isn’t generating any revenue to speak of anymore.

I personally suspect, that a lot of the “free culture” and “free information” and “creative common” folks around the web are either cleverly programmed AIs or (more likely) the cheap labor workforce reposting standard thoughts and arguments in order to keep their employers properties relevant.

An exclusive investigation into the bots that will cost companies over $6 billion this year